January 31, 2010

Why ABC News thought bringing in the CEO of a rival network as a pundit was a good idea is beyond me but one of the bright spots was getting to watch Paul Krugman call out Ailes to his face. Krugman hits Ailes for Fox's 'deliberate misinformation' on the health care bill and doing their part to make sure that the general public does not know what is in it.

WILL: So I don't think that when a man gets up and gives a speech full of cognitive dissonance, saying Washington is corrupt, Washington is annoying (ph), Washington is tiresome, Washington is dysfunctional, and Washington should have a much bigger role in American life, I think that -- that breeds, you might say, a kind of distrust and cynicism.

WALTERS: (inaudible) slash and burn....

KRUGMAN: If I can just -- you know, what bothers me is not the nasty language. Glenn Beck doesn't, you know, it's not -- what bothers me is the fact that people are not getting informed, that we are going through major debates on crucial policy issues; the public is not learning about them. And you know, you can say, well, they can read the New York Times, which will tell them what they need to know, but you know, most people don't. They don't read it thoroughly. They get -- on this health care thing, I'm a little obsessed with it, because it's a key issue for me. People did not know what was in the plan, and some of that was just poor reporting, some of it was deliberate misinformation. I have here in front of me when President Obama said, you know, why -- he said rhetorically, why aren't we going to do a health care plan like the Europeans have, with a government-run program, and then proceeds to explain whey he's different. On Fox News, what appeared was a clipped quote, "why don't we have a European-style health care plan?" Right, deliberate misinformation.

All of that has contributed to a situation where the public...

AILES: Wait a minute, wait a minute...

KRUGMAN: I can show you the clip, and you can...

(CROSSTALK)

AILES: The American people are not stupid...

KRUGMAN: No, they're not stupid. They are uninformed.

AILES: If you say -- if (inaudible) words are in the Constitution, if the founding fathers managed -- they didn't need 2,000 pages of lawyers to hide things, then tell, then tell...

KRUGMAN: Oh, come on. Legislation always is long.

AILES: ... then tell people it's an emergency that we get it, but it won't go into effect for three years. So you don't have time to read it, you...

(CROSSTALK)

KRUGMAN: People, again, this was a plan that is -- it's actually a Republican plan. It's Mitt Romney's health care plan. People were led to believe that it was socialism. That's -- and that was deliberate. That wasn't just poor reporting.

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